Volume 25 February 2014

H8

thenewinquiry.com

The New Inquiry Magazine is licensed under a creative commons license [cc-by-nc-nd 3.0] , 1935 Mad Love Cover: Cover: Editor-in-Chief Rachel Rosenfelt Creative Director Imp Kerr Executive Editor Rob Horning Senior Editors Emily Cooke, Malcolm Harris Managing Editor Joseph Barkeley Editors Atossa A. Abrahamian, Adrian Chen, Max Fox, Samantha Hinds Garcia, Sarah Leonard, Willie Osterweil Associate Editors Tim Barker, Erwin Montgomery Editors at Large Aaron Bady, Maryam Monalisa Gharavi Contributing Editors Elizabeth Greenwood, Nathan Jurgenson, Sarah Nicole Prickett, Ayesha A. Siddiqi Arts Editor at Large Jesse Darling A/V Editor Michelle Groskopf Puzzlemaster Jonathan Zalman Special Projects Natasha Lennard, John McElwee Business and Development Will Canine Reader and Advisor Michael Seidenberg Founding Editors Rachel Rosenfelt, Jennifer Bernstein, Mary Borkowski INTERVIEW REVIEWS

Slugs and Snails and Puppy Dog Tails Kill the Philosopher in Your Head An interview with parenting a review of Louis Althusser’s On the educator Rosalind Wiseman Reproduction of Capitalism by Malcolm Harris, 7 by Anne Boyer, 38

ESSAYS CROSSWORD PUZZLE A Change of Heart Dating in the Expanded Field by Jonathan Zalman, 42 by Mal Ahern and Moira Weigel, 11

Hate Sinks COLUMN by Jason Wilson, 17 Unsolicited Advice for Living Black Metal Is Sublime in the End Times by Adrian Van Young, 21 by Michael Seidenberg, 43 Everybody’s Doing It by Maxwell Neely-Cohen, 26 Consciously or Unconsciously by JW McCormack, 31 H8 Note

“THOSE who hate you can’t win un- being haters. Yet visit almost any well-trafficked comment less you hate them. And then you destroy yourself,” said thread and haters outnumber the rest. not Martin Luther King Jr. or Gandhi but that gentle soul The Internet has revealed, perhaps enabled, spec- Richard Nixon. Since the death of God, hate has taken the tacular hostility. Fame especially comes at a cost. It is place of sin as society’s transcendent no-no. Hatred of hate particularly expensive for women, who are guaran- crosses political divides, deployed to justify the war on teed misogynist hate mail upon achieving any online terror (“they hate our freedoms”) and to attack racist and prominence. As trolls and cyberbullies emerge as so- homophobic violence. As with hipsters, few people cop to ciety’s new bêtes noires, “Don’t read the comments” is ­necessary advice­ for the thin-skinned—which, it turns makes such poor propaganda not only because it’s writ- out, describes most of us. We’re good at dishing it, bad at ten by talentless idiots who see society as their own pri- taking it. Did the Internet merely remove a few technical vate kampf. The disjunction between the genocidal goals boundaries formerly repressing some Hobbesian truth of such über-haters and the humanizing nature of litera- of human nature? Is hate, one answer to the failure of net ture may stymie the fascists before they’ve even started. democracy, built into its very architecture? Or are haters And what of the banality that hate is not the op- just gonna hate? posite of love but rather its accomplice? For Mal Ahern At the front lines of this war is the comment mod- and Moira Weigel, there’s something in the structure erator. Predominantly female, these workers delete the of love that keeps breeding all this animosity. “Dating most malicious comments before they reach readers’ in the Expanded Field” attempts to define just what we eyes. In “Hate Sinks,” Jason Wilson demonstrates that the mean when we say dating, and why it keeps making us so uncivil standards of Internet discourse depend on the la- dysfunctional. A brief history of courtship and a series bor of young women. Even online, women can’t escape of structural investigations reveal that the answer is “it’s their roles as affective pressure valves. complicated.” In a history of a different sort of roman- Of course, hate does its nasty work off the Web, tic hatred, Adrian Van Young connects the dots between too—especially in school, where kids notoriously Death Metal and Lord Byron. Like Wagner, Wolves in the learn how to be mean, if they learn anything at all. Be- Throne Room is meant to be played as loudly as possible. ing popular used to be a shield for a few. Yet yesterday’s Do the anti-Enlightenment aesthetic excesses of the Ro- clear pecking order has been replaced by a tangle of af- mantics find an echo in the anti-Christian nihilistic vio- filiations and subgroups, as Maxwell Neely-Cohen ar- lence of Death Metal? “Black Metal Is Sublime” shows gues in “Everybody’s Doing It.” Now everyone is a bul- that the similarities between the two can be measured in ly and everyone is a target. Don’t blame peer pressure, more than decibels. which parents were always more worried about than Ought we to join the chorus and condemn the con- kids; blame adults, screwing things up more seriously demners, despise the despisers? What good will it do? than ever. Interviewed here about her new book, Mas- Censure has hardly dissuaded the trolls, let alone the terminds and Wingmen, writer and parenting educator white-supremacist parties gaining traction in European Rosalind Wiseman has some ideas for improvement. elections. Yet here, as in most things, it’s better to ignore Children and teens should be introduced to rather Nixon than to follow him. To reduce hate to affective en- than protected from complexity, she says. They de- emy No. 1 one is to blur the distinction between the big- serve to be treated with dignity rather than the usual oted grievance of the man who blames his failed business condescension. on immigrants and the righteous fury of the imprisoned Not so the Nazis, the stock example of simplemind- toward her jailor. Not all hatreds were born equal. Some ed hatred. Nazis haunt every conversation about hate should be quashed; a few should be felt, with conviction. crimes and racist violence. So why do they make such “I hate rarely,” said Anaïs Nin, “though when I hate, I a poor showing in literary history? With “Conscious- hate murderously.” She was talking about penis sucking, ly or Unconsciously,” JW McCormack takes on Ameri- Dutch paintings, parties, and cold weather. She was also can white supremacy’s most famous novel, speculative-­ talking about banks. It sharpens the senses to have an en- fiction epicThe Turner Diaries. National Socialist fiction emy. Hate well or not at all. MALCOLM HARRIS 7 Slugs and Snails and Puppy Dog Tails

ROSALIND WISEMAN interviewed by MALCOLM HARRIS

The author and parenting educator behindMean Girls talks sex, drugs, and her new book on boys

ROSALIND Wiseman is the au- thor of Queen Bees and Wannabes, Queen Bee Moms & King Pin Dads, Owning Up Curriculum, “Boys, Girls & Other Haz- ardous Materials,” and the new book Masterminds and Wing- men: Helping Our Boys Cope with Schoolyard Power, Lock- er-Room Tests, Girlfriends, and the New Rules of Boy World. Here, an exchange with New Inquiry editor Malcolm Harris. about to critique my words. Because here’s what I imagine: Me standing in front of a group of high school students “tell- ing” them what their social world looks like and how they Your methodology is interesting—you include as co-­ should navigate it—and being completely wrong. I know producers the subjects you’re writing about. Can you tell I don’t get everything right—and I would never be able me a bit about how that works and why you choose to do to because every teen has their own experience—but the it, both in Masterminds and in your past work? thought of going in front of them telling them what their I included the boys/guys because I can’t imagine writ- lives are like makes my stomach turn. Not only because I ing the things I do without asking the people I am writing don’t think I have the right to do that but also because I have 8 SLUGS AND SNAILS AND PUPPY DOG TAILS

a very deep motivation to not come across as yet another cially those with less power, should a young person be com- arrogant, presumptuous, patronizing adult. As I write this to pelled to “respect them?” No. you right now, I just saw that a student lit himself on fire at For example, why should a child respect his princi- a high school about 20 minutes away from me. How could I pal if that principal allows a student, teacher, coach, school possibly think I know what’s going on in kids’ lives without resource officer, etc. to dehumanize or humiliate another asking them? child? Dignity is also a touchstone for me. I constantly tell Your concern with dignity is the bedrock for Master- my students that even if you have every reason to seek re- minds, something I didn’t expect. Outside the World venge against someone else, your true character and how Social Forum or Chiapas, you don’t hear that language you choose to conduct yourself matters in moments of cri- very often, especially as it pertains to kids (a word I use sis and conflict. You don’t roll over, you’re not turning the broadly and nonpejoratively). Where does your concern other cheek, but it is the moment when you strive to treat with dignity come from? the person with inherent worth. I remind myself of this all I chose the language I use with and about young peo- the time because I am certainly not immune to feelings of ple very carefully because I believe they deserve to spoken to anger and desire for retribution. It’s in these moments that with integrity and honesty. Adults can be so patronizing and your actions have the best chance of being righteous—as in hypocritical in how they speak to young people and what just to yourself and others. about, that adults in general lose credibility. And because of that, even if they’re well-intentioned, they are incompetent The way you write about physical confrontation reminded moral and ethical guides. me of an old post by the blogger The Last Psychiatrist in In this case, I have always used dignity in talking to which he describes the way schools discourage righteous young people because its definition is tied to inherent behavior in kids. You actually offer a set of eight things worth. As in, everyone has the right to be treated with digni- boys should think about beforehand, rather than the ty (i.e. have their voice heard) and has the responsibility to standard “Get an adult” advice—even going so far as to treat others with dignity as well. In contrast, I think the word suggest there are good and legitimate reasons for school- respect is either overused or incorrectly used to the point yard fighting, like self-defense and the defense of others. where any true meaning is lost. Many years ago I became Why do you think teachers and administrators are so in- incredibly frustrated with how the word respect was used by vested in a zero-tolerance approach to physical conflict adults with young people. For example, often when adults between kids? say, “Respect your elders,” they mean, “Obey your elders.” If we don’t educate ourselves and be self-reflective and Respect, according to its Latin origins, means to ad- honest about what our children’s lives are truly like, we con- mire someone based on their accomplishments. Respect tribute to their alienation and we will be unable to provide is earned, dignity is given. Having respect for someone is insight and guidance to them. So often as adults we chose a choice each individual has the power to make. But what one extreme or the other (never fight or you have to fight compels you to respect that person? We are often taught that to truly get respect) and if we really took a moment to think respect equals obeying and/or fearing someone with more about what we are saying to them, we’d realize we are saying power or status than you. But if that person acts unethically things that, even if we truly believe them, don’t actually help or isn’t upholding the dignity of those around them, espe- our kids to handle themselves competently in the world. MALCOLM HARRIS 9

There’s a lot in the book about representations of sex it’s just so easy for teens and children to think of the most and sexuality—both with regard to Internet porn and ridiculous thing possible, look it up, and see disturbing ­sexting—but not much on teens having sex with each oth- things without being able to process it productively. They er. That happens to be the case for actual teens too, with can see people look like they’re really hurting each other. the number of 15-to-19 year olds claiming to have had Kids and teens probably aren’t going to know about safe sex down from 1988 to 2010 by about 10 percent for girls words, and even if they did (because their mom bought and about 20 percent for boys. Is teen sex necessarily a 50 Shades and left it around the house), how does the problem? What right do you think teenagers have to sexu- parent explain that power dynamic to them in a develop- al expression and exploration? How can parents mediate mentally appropriate way? between the famous Mean Girls sex-ed scene (“You will I am continuing to struggle my way through how to get chlamydia and die”) and the compulsory sexuality talk to parents and teens about porn but I do know reac- of raunch culture? How do you find a balance as a par- tionary fear never works—no matter the subject. ent between the knowledge that emergent sexuality is an important part of a healthy adolescence and not wanting In the section of Masterminds on “Gray Areas” you your kids having sex in your house? talk about admitting complexity to kids. You imagine I recently attended the Adult Entertainment Expo a hypothetical conversation with a 15-year-old about in Las Vegas where I interviewed porn stars and directors. drinking at parties and suggest focusing on possible I went because I believe it is my responsibility to learn consequences rather than moralizing. You write, “If we as much as I can about cultural influences on gender dy- want them doing the right thing, we have to explain the namics and adolescent sexuality. I don’t think you can wrong choice in terms that truly matter to them.” In a be a parenting expert today without educating yourself society that’s constantly bombarding kids with anxiety about pornography. about their futures, do you think there’s a danger in em- I have just begun to process what I think about what phasizing social consequences like that? I remember a I’ve learned there, but my central focus is the same as before guy in college who wouldn’t have an underage drink at I went to AVN. Young people have the right to come into 20 because he wanted to be a politician and he feared their sexuality without shame despite living in a culture that it could damage his future—is he really who parents is constantly exploiting their sexuality (mostly girls) or giv- want their children to be? ing them such a regressive constrained gender lens in which I would distinguish between career aspirations (like to explore their sexual desires. The bottom line is teens have your friend the politician) and a calling or profession the right to come into their sexuality on their own terms. as an extension of one’s passions. Yes, it’s a sound bite What is a problem is teens who have natural sexual but one of the few, I believe, that are true. One of the curiosity looking to porn to give them a readily available big challenges is to get parents to see how they speak to source of sexual information and imagery that so often their children about exactly this issue beyond the sound portrays the rape “fantasies” as the sex that women really bite. That was something I really learned from the boys. want, the all-powerful male dominating the weak wom- If we can get parents to get beyond “Always try your best” an, or the good girl gone bad who wants to do whatever “Things are just going to get harder ...” “I know what it her sexual partner wants, game for anything. And since was like to be in X grade”—things could really change for it’s so easy to find whatever fetish you can think of online, the better. 10 SLUGS AND SNAILS AND PUPPY DOG TAILS

On passions, how do you think parents should talk with unequally applied. When pot became legal in Colorado— their children about passions that are risky in one way or where we live—we talked to them about the three-strikes another? I’m thinking particularly of football, given the law, the racist application of crack cocaine laws starting with recent media attention, but it applies to a kid who gets re- the Reagan era, etc. But I believe strongly that I communi- ally into drug-based guitar music too, or a daughter who cate what the laws are that could possibly apply to my sons really wants to do beauty pageants. as they become teens. If they break those laws, they will be As a parent I want to know why my child is passionate held accountable. And more important, insofar as alcohol about what he’s doing, because passions driven by what the and drugs, it’s much more important to me to talk about overall culture says we should value need to be challenged. how vulnerable it makes them to get involved with screwed- Beauty pageants come to mind most easily—a girl being up, unethical things going down—whether or not they get passionate about conforming to a rigid regressive demand officially “caught.” of female beauty and behavior is something I would have a serious problem with. But I am just as demanding of my How do you think the increased social importance placed sons about why they’re interested in the things they’re on college admissions has affected the way we think of into—they love pistol shooting. They love knowing about good parenting—if you think it has at all? guns. My older son loves throwing a knife. I know from per- One of the most important things I would change sonal experience (it’s my throwing knife he’s using) why it’s about parenting, and it’s closely tied to the passions ques- fascinating and the feeling that comes over you when you tion, is persuading parents to value their child learning throw a knife, whether you’re male or female, but the fantasy something that they can do throughout their life. Valuing in his head of the all-powerful, emotionless male isn’t lost on craft, knowing how things work, and being able to fix things me. He also plays football—I’m not crazy about that—but in the physical world should be valued highly—no differ- I respect and trust his coaches, and he needs the physical ently than going to college. Now that I am living outside the outlet. But for all his passions, it’s been non-negotiable for D.C./NYC world, I think people do value it more highly in me and his father that he experiment with other forms of Colorado and you can see it in daily life. When the flood self-expression, like art. This is the reason that he is now happened in September, no one panicked; people here have spray-painting (freehand and stencil) his room with our a sense of being able to handle things in the physical world. blessing. In my mind, at least, it’s an ode to Banksy. Everyone had the things they needed, and if they didn’t, someone else did who helped them out. I now realize how How can parents offer consistent messages when the larg- important this is. During the flood there was no panicked er society can’t make up its mind? Take marijuana, for ex- craziness at the hardware stores. I stood in disbelief as peo- ample: You have the law saying it’s a dangerous narcotic ple’s houses were literally being washed away and they were and then you have Sanjay Gupta on TV saying it’s med- calmly figuring out what was the best sump pump to use. icine. How do you talk to your children about laws that In D.C. when there is a weather emergency, people have no don’t make sense or contradictory rules that they’re still idea how to take care of themselves beyond running to the bound by? How do you instill honesty while also teaching market to buy milk. They shovel out parking spaces in front the kind of day-to-day hypocrisy being alive requires? of their house and then put up folding chairs to mark their I can answer this as a parent. Both my husband and territory. We need competent people in the world, and that I admit to our children that laws are often arbitrary and may not be about going to college. MAL AHERN AND MOIRA WEIGEL 11 Dating in the Expanded Field

A pastiche, with apologies to Rosalind Krauss, by MAL AHERN and MOIRA WEIGEL

Dating has left behind the modernist binaries that once defined it. To survey the field we now face, we need a map.

i. term partners use “dating” to describe the relationship that each of them has to a third, who supports both as their patron, while others take “dating” to mean lying Over the past 10 years, rather surprising things have about in their pajamas and queuing up yet another epi- come to be called “dating”: midnight invitations to sode of Breaking Bad. ­parties-in-progress, hookups arranged entirely by email, No category could cover such a motley of activi- or one-on-one excursions to movies and drinks with a ties unless that category had become almost infinitely friend with whom one has drunkenly slept. Some long- malleable. And indeed the meaning of the term dating 12 DATING IN THE EXPANDED FIELD

has grown so vague that it obscures the very thing it is riage one hoped to obtain from the process. A man and a ­supposed to capture. Boomer parents bewail the hook- woman sat together in a domestic space that the women up culture that they say has replaced dating, while their of her family watched over. If the call went well, more adult children stare into the abyss of Craigslist and won- calls followed; eventually, the couple married and began der whether they even know what dating is. Yet we would to sit as husband and wife in their own domestic space— submit that we know very well what dating is. And one which she would happily manage for the rest of her life. of the things we know is that it is a historically bounded For a century, calling successfully produced enor- category, not an eternal one. mous numbers of households. But these classical court- Dating, we propose, was courtship in what we ship conventions were not immutable. There came a might call its high-modernist phase. A classical phase time when their logic began to fail. In the early 20th cen- preceded it. And in 2014, long after what many have tury, would-be paramours gradually began leaving the declared a “death of dating,” we are fully within an era parlor. By the 1920s men no longer accepted invitations of romantic postmodernism. In each of these periods, to call on women—instead, they took them out. This courtship obeys a cultural logic that may appear inflexi- modernist period of courtship introduced the idea of ble. But any strict definition of courtship would be mis- the “date”—in which “the call” lived on only as a marker. leading. Because, in fact, each of these periods creates a I’ll pick you up at seven. The essential homelessness of field of possibility that can support a variety of romantic the date was written into its very structure: It required a and sexual practices. To survey the field we face at pres- departure time. ent, we need a map. The modern date was the opposite of the call, the call’s first negation. Instead of a woman inviting a man into her domestic space, a man invited a woman out of her home and into public—where he paid for things ii. and therefore called the shots. Rather than reproduc- ing the domestic life of their parents, dating promised young men and women liberation. It let them loose in a But first, some backstory. For many centuries, the logic separate world centered on urban sites of spectacle and of middle-class courtship remained inseparable from the mass consumption—on movie theaters and dance halls, logic of marriage. Before the dawn of dating, the domi- boardwalks and restaurants. Young daters publicly trad- nant form of such courtship was “calling.” According to ed time, company, and money. They soon realized that, custom, young women in the Victorian era extended even if such novel settings allowed them to ditch their invitations to suitable young men, asking them to visit ­chaperones, dating made its own demands. their homes at appointed times. Typically, the members Young men and women no longer had to play at of the prospective couple met in her family parlor, su- housework, but in exchange they took on new forms pervised by her female relatives. of labor. They had to select the sorts of fashions, foods, To the present day reader, this mating dance may and activities that would make them appear attractive to resemble nothing so much as a kind of awkward “office prospective mates. And, of course, they needed to earn hours” of the heart. But in the 19th century, the setting enough money to buy those fashions, food, and tickets. and rituals of calling powerfully symbolized the mar- Dating’s “site,” its symbolic content, was not the home MAL AHERN AND MOIRA WEIGEL 13 but the marketplace. It was training not for marriage, but for productive membership in consumer society. iii. As such, dating became one of our most robust cultural forms. Through it, the field of courtship began to expand. Over the course of the 20th century, dating loos- It is crucial, then, that we expand our description of ro- ened and finally unraveled the Victorian sexual mores mance to include the whole structural logic of contempo- and gender roles that had guided the 19th century mid- rary romance, beyond dating. Using dating as our starting dle class. The culture of calling had treated marriage and point, we can create a logically expanded map. We will celibacy as if they stood in opposition. To be not married start by illustrating dating’s most basic, minimal definition. was to be celibate, and to be not-celibate was to be married. But as dating became the dominant form of courtship, the relationship between these terms began to shift. Promis- cuity ceased to be only a mark of aristocratic privilege or lower-class degeneration. Dating made sleeping around bourgeois—respectable. It thus introduced a third term in the field of oppositions that had long defined Western courtship. If we may borrow the terms from the original op- position, we might say that dating emerged as an alterna- tive to the old binary of marriage versus celibacy; more specifically, it negated marriage and celibacy. Dating was the sum of not-marriage, and not-celibacy. It was before or proximate to marriage, but not marriage. To date was In order to expand the field of dating, we can bor- not to be assured of sex. But to date conventionally was to row a tool that French structuralist social scientists called rule out celibacy, by which we mean the deliberate refus- a Klein set or Piaget group. The Klein set uses a series of al of sexual romance. logical expansions to transform any supposed binary into However, as dating developed over the twentieth a quarternary field. That is, it allows us to build upon a century, it gradually lost the stable repertoire of activities familiar opposition by showing that each of its compo- and spaces with which it was first associated. Today, at nents belongs to another opposition. For instance, the the beginning of the twenty-first century, the only thing Klein set shows that marriage is not only opposed to cel- we can be certain of with respect to dating is that the ibacy; marriage is also opposed to not-marriage in all its dater is neither (monogamously) married nor celibate. forms. And celibacy is not only the opposite of marriage; More and more, “dating” refers simply to a combination there are many varieties of not-celibacy that one might live. of negations. The term has become a catch-all for any The expanded diagram acknowledges that marriage and romantic activity that is neither marriage nor celibacy. celibacy—as positive terms—are also ideas that organize But of course even this broadest definition of dating much contemporary romantic behavior. But it also allows does not even begin to cover the spectrum of romantic us to begin sketching in activities and attitudes that the ­experiences available to us. old framework had no means to represent. 14 DATING IN THE EXPANDED FIELD

If we expand the classical marriage-celibacy opposition, we get a diagram that looks like this:

Here, dating is no longer only the middle term between two things that it is not. Rather, dating becomes one term on the periphery of a field in which there are other possibilities with different structures. The diagram enables us to envision three other categories. Each of them is a condition of the field itself, but none of them assimilable to mere dating. They are: MAL AHERN AND MOIRA WEIGEL 15

The possible combination of marriage and not-­ ­audiences as dating. Dating, rather than simply standing marriage yields a number of intermediary forms. For ex- for the state of not-marriage, has become a productive ample, cohabitation is not necessarily marriage, nor is it cultural trope in its own right. not-marriage. One who is, or has, a mistress also sits in If we accept this fact, we can introduce another set this quadrant. The ur-form of marriage plus not-marriage of oppositions into our diagram. That is, we can further may be the affair: the married person’s passionate com- expand the field.Marriage and celibacy still fit into this mitment to betrayal. This quadrant is particularlyFrench . new schema, because ideas about sex and commitment The addition ofcelibacy and not celibacy brings us to still govern our thinking about romance. But postmod- a set of social practices that lie between sex and its antith- ern courtship subjects these terms to a double negation. esis. Desire has traditionally been connected to pursuit of Imagine, then, that the opposite of not-marriage is not mar- contact. But today we have many ways of decoupling the riage, but, rather, not-not-marriage: the state of not actively two. Innumerable technologies—online porn, Tinder, avoiding marriage. The opposite ofnot-celibacy is, similar- Grindr, camgirls, Chatroulette, and Snapchat—allow us ly, not-not-celibacy: it is not the active pursuit of a sexual to engage in forms of sex that leave the body untouched. interest, but rather an openness to the possibility of sex. The addition of not-celibacy to celibacy allows even the These doubly-negative terms can help us more clearly rec- chaste, who don’t get any, to get off. ognize several novel forms of contemporary relationship. The marriage-celibacy complex lies at the top of What lies between not-marriage and not-not-mar- the map; it represents dating’s equal and opposing force. riage? Those who are neither married nor actively avoid- Evidence abounds that our culture considers marriage ing marriage: they are the domestic daters, the cohabi- unsexy­ by definition. The age of dating has created countless, tating couple whose members are still trying each other powerful images of sexless marriage as the extreme to which on for size. Their relationship may have the feel of an dating is opposed: the life of minivans wending toward expediently “shared lease” or of a dress rehearsal for per- kids’ soccer games, takeout, sweatpants, Netflix binges, and manent domesticity. Either way, it remains distinct from bed-death. Marriage is commitment; dating is freedom: the the French-style affair or ménage, which accepts its place freedom to leave the domestic sphere, to define one’s self by outside the marriage-celibacy complex. Domestic daters one’s choices on the sexual market. Yet, for many people, live together in conflict. They do not know whether or marriage remains dating’s goal. We recoil in horror before not their arrangement will lead to marriage. Perhaps one an eternity of sexlessness, even as we aspire to it. party hopes for marriage while the other is certain it will not happen. More likely, both are ambivalent. Either way, this quadrant is very twenty-something. The union ofnot-marriage and not-not-marriage also iv. yields a newly-emergent legal category: the civil union. Many couples obtain a civil union because they would like to marry, but the state will not let them. Crucially The logic of modernist dating is in crisis. Perhaps this is they are not-married: they do not have the rights and priv- because, despite conservative efforts to preserve them, ileges of marriage. Yet they are not-not-married, because marriage and celibacy are no longer strong cultural forms. they live and feel married in almost every other sense. Or at least they are not as captivating to 21st ­ century On the other side of the graph, there is the addition of 16 DATING IN THE EXPANDED FIELD

not-celibate, and not-not-celibate. This terminology is vex- ity, and its guarantee of sexual access. This entire quad- ing, yet the situation it describes is all too familiar. We rant may fall under the category of “postdating.” Its pos- associate with many people to whom we are attracted, or sibilities range from the destructive and exploitative to to whom we could become attracted, but with whom we the passionately new. Rather than assimilate these rela- have decided to remain “just friends.” At least for the time tionships to the rules of dating, we would do well to in- being. Ambigudates do not promise sex, but they don’t vestigate this field more rigorously, on its own terms. It not, either. Some just-friends, after trying and failing to deserves its own radically expanded map. turn ambiguous relationships into the sexual relationships These transformations don’t necessarily represent they desire, begin to resent this quadrant. On innumerable progress toward ever better, freer modes of being. They Reddit threads and “Men’s Rights” message boards, angry represent changes in the structural possibilities that gov- men rail against their exile to what they have dubbed “the ern sex, pleasure, and reproduction at any given moment in friend zone.” But such complaints—that one has been uni- time. Transformations in the field of courtship are histori- laterally banished to friendship—misunderstand the zone cal events. A structural analysis, therefore, is not enough. A of “just friends.” It takes two to ambigudate. And two—or complete map still leaves us with the task of explanation. more!—can go on happily ambigudating for years. How do institutions uphold these structures, and what fac- At the bottom of this newly-expanded field of dat- tors have allowed them to change at specific moments? To ing sit several of our most beguiling cultural forms: the really understand where we are now, and where we might go fuck buddy, friend with benefits, erotic friendship. These from here, we don’t just need a bigger diagram. We need a forms of relationship forgo marriage’s contractual stabil- history of dating. JASON WILSON 17 Hate Sinks

By JASON WILSON

The facade of liberal democracy stays clean only by putting young women in hate’s way

MODERATORS bring social-media pages for the output of users “who will just silences to the Internet’s city of words. They read every- post the word cunt 50 times for like three hours.” It is Mi- thing so that we don’t have to. In sites under moderation, chelle who, daily, reads and deletes the many comments they have filtered everything we see. It is Courtney (one posted to news stories on immigration “calling for asy- of the many moderators, all given pseudonyms here, that lum seekers to be burned in their boats.” Moderators try I interviewed as part of my research on ideas of civility to keep their employers in the clear by banishing antago- and changes in the public sphere), not us, who combs nism that exceeds the anachronistic limits of a delibera- the threads of an Australian broadcaster’s website and tive public sphere. 18 HATE SINKS

But this means we necessarily don’t see their part by how much comment they attract. So for every work. Readers can’t look at what goes on in the content-­ story, a thread. management system or the stream of user comments well- The promoters of this ethos, including many aca- ing up in it. We can never know what has been cut or why. demics focused on the future of news, have successfully We may assume, but we can never be sure, what was hacked persuaded managers that comment sections are not only a out to leave the telltale scar: “comment deleted by moder- way to cement the bond between reader and news brand, ator.” On the sleek surfaces of big media sites, there are no but are ipso facto democratizing. The online expression of signs of the frenetic backstage efforts to staunch the hemor- voice, political participation, and democracy are smoothly, rhaging of their gravitas, or of the pace that Sarah sets when unproblematically equated. “you’ve got three hours and there’s 1,500 comments to get In an earlier period of mass media hegemony, broad- through, and they have to be read and thought about, and casters and the press set agendas, marshaled debate, and, you’ve got to check links.” with other liberal-democratic institutions, defined the limits of legitimate dissent. They decided whose voice was heard in political debate and who was ignored. This meant privileged access for white men with a measure of existing authority, We can think and views within the dichotomies—of party and approved ideology—that kept liberal democracy stable. Now these of moderators’ legacy institutions must contend with a larger, demand-­ driven and user-focused media landscape. Content is abun- bodies as being dant, and counterpublics proliferate in spaces from which they were once banished. the element of an Inviting the audience to comment is a way of making older institutions relevant to this changed world. But al- electronic circuit lowing the expression of popular voice carries the constant that dissipates risk that what Benjamin Arditi calls the “table manners” of liberal democracy will be breached. Unfamiliar political de- excess energy mands might be made, conspiracy theories of power aired, defamatory imputations hurled, and publishing laws broken. The passions and unresolvable tensions of our increasingly This imperceptibility means that we may not stop agonistic polities jar alongside the sober, neutral register of to think much about moderation as a form of labor that mainstream reporting. composes the Internet. But as the need to grant the audi- At the same time, the topics that promise especial- ence “a voice” has become conventional wisdom, almost ly bitter, polarized debate, tempt editors with the traffic every media organization now needs this work done. Al- and comments they can attract. Sarah rattles off a list of though the transitions are often poorly planned—Sar- themes she knows she will have a long comment queue— ah complains her managers seem to be “making it up as and that editors will keep publishing: “Israel and Pales- they go along”—­traditional organizations have adopted tine, Gaza … anything on climate change, the science the Internet’s measures of success, evaluating stories in of climate change. Anything published by one of the JASON WILSON 19

­climate-change skeptics. But then anything published by even less control. On Facebook, the handling of user con- a climate-change believer as well. Anything about refu- tent is determined by the limited settings that Zuckerberg’s gees, you know, asylum seekers, border control, that sort engineers have made available. But this does not necessari- of stuff. Anything sort of what could be loosely described ly lessen the demand, from employers and readers alike, for as a feminist article, so you know, like Slutwalk.” moderators to keep pages clean and protect the brand. Social This complex tension—between voice and civility, media multiplies the difficulty of the job, as many modera- eyeballs and deliberation—is one that future-of-news en- tors are forced to divide their time between company web- thusiasts are good at waving away, but that comment mod- sites and social media accounts. On organizational Facebook erators must bear. Within representative democracy, we can pages, Courtney says that they “can’t control the discussion think of moderators’ bodies as being like that element of an because it’s not pre-moderated, it’s post-­moderated, but we electronic circuit that dissipates excess energy and allows do need to be going through them and looking for things it to function. They absorb the excess affects in a period of that are totally unacceptable. It just doesn’t happen to the political dysfunction, and allow institutions to appear stable extent that it should.” It’s impossible not to wonder wheth- and unchallenged. They maintain the semblance of civility er maintaining this veneer of civility can be anything other after older infrastructures have fallen into disrepair. They than piecemeal and retrograde. suck up discursive heat so that political communications The sheer weight of comments—the renewable ener- systems can keep flowing according to their archaic fantasies gy of opinion—becomes a source of anxiety, if not trauma. of civil, public discourse. If computers have such heat sinks, In post-moderation, long queues are invisible to comment- moderators are hate sinks. ers, who expect that their opinions will be voiced instan- taneously. In trying to deal with the build-up, Sarah, with a professional past as a mental health worker, was led to a GIVEN the contradictions they must try specific self-diagnosis. “I do remember at one stage feeling to stabilize, the worst fate for a moderator is to work on a really quite stressed. And so realizing that I was suffering … successful site publishing topical material. Sarah’s employer it sounds extreme but I did think ‘this feels like vicarious “had no money to resource themselves properly with deal- trauma to me’, because it just got upsetting. And it was just ing with the success of the site. If it had been properly re- sort of the relentlessness of it because it just didn’t stop, you sourced there’d be more people working on the comments know? It just kept coming, and it didn’t stop.” and therefore kind of, you know, one or two people having After the lean years of economic crisis, and the serial that experience not so intense.” The problem was “just the disappointments of official politics, the voice of the people sheer numbers. You’d get to the end of the day and feel like is frequently raw. Caught between an angry and desperate you hadn’t done anything just because of the sheer num- citizenry and the inertia of contemporary politics, Courtney bers sitting there”. The work is often done with gimcrack can only summon a queasy enthusiasm for this work. “It’s equipment, designed in a gentler age where there was far kind of like getting an injection for something. It’s not good, less content to process. At Louise’s job, “the technology but I know I have to have it. It’s good but it doesn’t make it that we use ... it’s pretty old. It’s pretty basic. It’s been—it’s nice. Like the dentist.” the same software I was using when I started six years ago.” Like many of her colleagues, she consoles herself that On social-media platforms, where their employers have at least, for now, moderators have work. Despite bumper been encouraged to develop their presence, moderators have ­enrollments in journalism and communication programs, 20 HATE SINKS

the news business offers few paid openings for graduates. they are deputized to shore up the legitimacy of institu- But moderation is at least one hiring area where youth might tions which have historically excluded and currently ex- trump experience. It helps that no one who has been around ploit them, freeing the powerful to present all of this as for very long wants to do it. At Louise’s broadcast-news or- a democratic undertaking. Until we do, moderators will ganization, “People know how painful it is, but the thing is, suffer in vain, preserving the facade of civility in an era of none of the senior producers ever have to do those shifts, sharpening antagonisms. none of the executive producers ever have to do those shifts.” In bringing this to light we will also notice that the Jim, an ex-moderator now in a mid-level supervisory posi- work of moderation is gendered. It is not just that the pow- tion, admits that “there’s the acknowledgment that it’s not erful have found a way to mute our discontent, but they have the sort of thing that you can do for weeks on end and re- done so in a way that puts a lot of young, mostly female bod- tain your sanity. [But] I don’t think the emotional side of it ies in the way of hate speech. In my qualitative research, I is really acknowledged, or maybe it’s more that when you’re found that the overwhelming majority of moderators were doing those shifts you don’t really feel like you can reach out women, and most were relatively recent graduates. This is to people in a formal way.” consistent with the high ratios of female to male graduates in Observing contemporary communicative and affec- journalism and communication degrees in the U.S. (about tive excess—the kind that moderators encounter daily— 3 to 1) and Australia (up to 4 to 1 in some degrees), and political theorist Jodi Dean also notes liberal democracy’s also with the disproportionate number of men occupying enduring, systemic resilience, and names this disjunction full time and prominent positions, further up the chain. In “communicative capitalism.” She thinks that the upsurge in the era of social media, this adds up to a cruel equation: Not the circulation of political content “in the dense, intensive only do women face streams of hate directed at themselves networks of global communications relieves top-level ac- on personal accounts, they also scrub similar threads clean tors (corporate, institutional and governmental) from the for their employers. obligation to respond.” The energies of mediated opposi- For many women, as Amanda Hess has shown, encoun- tional debate and activism are reabsorbed as informational tering hate online is an everyday reality. But if some spaces commodities. The gap between “politics as content” and the appear devoid of such abuse, it is because there are women workings official politics widens. As for “democratization”: absorbing still more negative affect in order to preserve a “the proliferation, distribution, acceleration and intensifi- zombie version of liberal civility. Dispelling the lonely si- cation of communicative access and opportunity, far from lences of moderation will not only let us recognize workers’ enhancing democratic governance or resistance, results in labor but will also allow us to better understand how politics precisely the opposite.” Comments promote not critique, fails to satisfy in liberal democracies. And when we better ap- but control. preciate who bears the costs of our vaunted communicative But if this is true, it happens at the expense of mod- freedoms, we may be less inclined to see democracy as the erators. Dean risks making communicative capitalism ability to sound off, and more insistent on defining it as the seem weightless. She leaves out the affective labor of that capacity to speak together as equals. allows a semblance of liberal conversation to persist. We must add to her version of our impasse by emphasizing *All names have been changed and employers not named in order to pro- how this systemic resilience relies on a precariously em- tect the employment and welfare of the many media workers in Australia and the U.S. who so generously talked to me about moderation. In re- ployed and female labor force. We must understand how naming them I have given them names of the same gender. ADRIAN VAN YOUNG 21 Black Metal Is Sublime

By ADRIAN VAN YOUNG

In their propensity for corpse paint and murder, bands like Bathory and Gorgoroth are the unlikely fulfillment of Romantic ideals: absolute inwardness turned outward

IN a now infamous interview at 2010’s Scion Rock Fest, Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, the singer and guitarist of the

Brooklyn-based Black Metal band Liturgy, explained why , 2009 his band doesn’t “play grim music” or “wear corpse paint.” He said he was “sickened by reveling in negativity”: “There is a fundamental substratum of chaos that is very destruc- Trash past death past Trash tive [but] also a creative force … and I think the only way to deal with the void and the flux of chaos is to affirm it.” Imp Kerr, Imp Kerr, 22 BLACK METAL IS SUBLIME

That is why Liturgy plays what he calls “transcendental Below the YouTube clip in which Hendrix-Hunt black metal,” a posi-core anomaly in the otherwise wrathful makes this argument, the comments range from puerile subgenre of greater Black Metal. and intolerant (“what a fuck. even his band looks like “True” or traditional Black Metal—not what they want him to shut the fuck up. hipster fag”) to an- Hunt-Hendrix plays—is an operatically dissonant blend of alytical (“Looks like it’s time for Cradle of Filth to re- screeching vocals, tremolo picking, and blast beats, played by tire as the whipping boys of Black Metal”) to outraged musicians in spiked jewelry and the corpse paint Hunt-Hen- (“What a bunch of PRETENTIOUS BULLSHIT”) to drix disdains, with Hammer Horror-sounding stage-names menacing (“I personally want to go murder HUNTER along the lines of Count Grishnackh, Faust, and Nocturno HUNT-HENDRIX”)—which, given Scandinavian Black Metal’s history, is no empty threat. Only a few of the 200- plus commenters come to Hunt-Hendrix’s defense. This is a shame, because Hunt-Hendrix has his geneal- ogy right. Aesthetically, artistically, and ideologically, Black Metal and Romanticism are two sides of the same scuffed Black Metal, coin. Indeed, right down to the cherry-pit cleft in his chin, Hunt-Hendrix—who has written an 11-page aesthetics of course, has manifesto called “Transcendental Black Metal”—is a ringer for none other than Lord Byron, the 19th century bastion a penchant for of what the poet Robert Southey called the “Satanic school” of verse. The Courier judged Byron as having “a brain from Satanic aesthetics heaven and a heart from hell”—someone who “seems to have lived only that the world might learn from his example as well. how worthless and how pernicious a thing is genius, when divorced from religion, from morals and from humanity.” Byron, as did many other Romantics, courted what scholars have since come to refer to as “Satanic aesthetics,” a rebellious and sinister dandyism that manifested not only Culto, typically espousing an antiphilosophy of misanthrop- in their artistic creations but also in their personalities. Ro- ic individualism. In the genre’s native Norway in the early- mantic violinist Niccolo Paganini–whose successor Franz to-mid 1990s, Black Metal spawned a culture of criminal Lizst maintained an “unbelievable” yet strictly heterosexu- one-upmanship that left in its wake least three documented al “passion” for fellow heartthrob Byron—was rumored to murders, several suicides, and a swathe of burned churches have perfected his musical technique while imprisoned for and grave desecrations. the murder of his mistress, a skein of whose intestine had But “beneath all the grim vibes of Black Metal,” been repurposed as his G-string. The bejeweled and fre- Hunt-Hendrix insists, “there’s this kind of spiritual ecstasy.” quently open-shirted Bryon was the pointed inspiration for The tremolo picking creates the effect of “a string orchestra.” Lord Ruthven in John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819), whose The great “unacknowledged influence” of the genre? Nine- “Byronic look” was marked by “the curl of the upper lip, and teenth century Romanticism. the scowl of the brow.” ADRIAN VAN YOUNG 23

Black Metal, of course, has a penchant for Satanic to mass ridicule.” Whether Black Metal artists and fans aesthetics as well. In the hooded, sword-wielding visage are aware of this ridicule themselves, however, is an open of Rob Darken of Poland’s National-Socialist-leaning question. Black Metalers refuse to camp, no matter how Graveland we see a medieval specter worthy of Horace “campy” they seem at first glance. They refuse to reflect Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), or one that might self-consciously on their practice the way Hunt-Hendrix have been conceived during the famous 1816 idyll of By- reflects in his manifesto. Black Metal musicians play Black ron, Polidori, and the Shelleys on Lake Geneva, which Metal because it’s what they’re driven to play. Reflection is ultimately yielded Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The for “hipster fags”; it’s “PRETENTIOUS BULLSHIT” that Modern Prometheus. In the corpse-paint makeup, flowing invites a death sentence. I point this out not to condone the hair, and scowling of Norway’s Darkthrone or England’s occasional intolerance of Black Metal’s musicians and fans Cradle of Filth (whose Romantic stage antics are as re- so much as to highlight the fact that the widespread resis- viled among partisans of “true” Black Metal as Hunt-Hen- tance to gazing inward has become as innate to Black Metal drix’s manifesto) we see an echo of the red waistcoats and culture as “absolute inwardness” was to Romantics. green wigs of the followers of French poet Gerard de Ner- The Romantics gave vent to inwardness by way of art; val, who led a lobster on a string through the streets of Black Metalers take inwardness to its illogical extreme. For 19th-century Paris. “true” Black Metalers more than dabble in Satanic and hea- The angular tunics of Norwegian band Immortal then “aesthetics”—they externalize their hate and despair call up the Gothic Cologne Cathedral (though Immor- in acts of violence and defilement that achieve (for them tal themselves would probably love to see it burn), whose anyway) the Black Metal equivalent of the Romantic Sub- construction was left unfinished in 1473 only to recom- lime, which, as Edmund Burke argued in 1757, appears in mence at the height of the Romantic era. And Norway’s the person who experiences it as a regenerative humbling of Gorgoroth, who favor spikes and bullet-belts and braided the soul in the face of inconceivable terror. In Black Metal, beards and livestock blood, would make fitting owners striving toward light becomes striving toward darkness. Re- of the gem-encrusted pet tortoise from J.K. Huysman’s generation goes to rot. Against Nature (1884), a novel whose entropic dandy of a protagonist, Des Esseintes, keeps bejeweling the poor animal until finally it suffocates to death. IN 1991, Per “Dead” Ohlin, Swedish vocalist for Hegel describes the Romantics as prizing “absolute the Norwegian Black Metal band Mayhem put a shot- inwardness” realized through “sounds and images, dreams gun against his forehead and pulled the trigger, leaving and visions”—i.e., art—through which “the gate to under- behind a suicide note that read: “Excuse all the blood.” standing can be opened.” Black Metal has typically prided Mayhem’s surviving members not only photographed itself on a wholesale dismissal of “inwardness,” and the the aftermath of Dead’s suicide for the cover of their al- Black Metal movement has proved notoriously deadpan bum Dawn of the Black Hearts, but the band’s founder when it comes to the genre’s aesthetic, to a degree that Euronymous courted rumors that he had cannibalized verges on camp. As Joe McIver suggests in Extreme Met- portions of Dead’s brain and crafted choice bits of Dead’s al (2000), “The cod-­devilry of [Black Metal] songs, cou- skull into morbid talismans. pled with the often hammy stage shows that [Bathory and In 1992, Bard “Faust” Eithun stabbed a gay man to Mercyful Fate] and a host of other imitators produced, led death in a park in Lillehammer, Norway. 24 BLACK METAL IS SUBLIME

One misty night in 1993, beneath the black mark of it appear like a vast sheet of fire.” Nearly 200 years later, Bard Black Metal’s becoming, Euronymous himself was mur- “Faust” Eithun of Emperor recalls of the arson of Holmen- dered by rival scenester, Burzum front man Varg Vikernes, in kollen Chapel: “We rode up the mountain to watch it burn. another stabbing incident for which Vikernes was locked up It was very beautiful and exciting—when we got back to [the for 16 years. (He was released in 2009.) record store Helvete in Oslo] we could hardly sleep.” While Later in 1993, the founding members of German Varg Vikernes says of the greater aim of the burnings: “It’s a NSBM band Absurd strangled a classmate to death with a psychological picture—an almost dead fire, a symbol of our length of electrical chord under circumstances suggestively heathen consciousness. The point was to throw dry wood similar to Faust’s Lillehammer murder. and branches on that, to light it up and reach toward the sky In 2005, five years before being named “gay person of again, as a growing force.” the year” at the Bergen Gay Galla, Ghaal of Gorgoroth was Out of the mouths of murderers. arrested, tried, and imprisoned for “torture-like violence” Both Bard Eithun and Vikernes’ accomplice to the against a stranger, though Ghaal claimed he was acting in murder of Euronymous, Snorre Ruch, recorded similar sub- self-defense. lime experiences in the act of taking or abetting the taking And from 1992 to 1996, legions of Black Metal artists of another human life. Writes Eithun: “It was like looking at and fans set fire to over 50 churches around Norway and this whole incident through eyes outside of my body. It was other parts of Europe, the embers of which would disperse as if I was looking at two people who were having a fight— and flare up as far away as Southern Florida. and one had a knife, so it was easy to kill the other person.” The churches that burned and fell to Black Metal were Of fleeing the scene of the crime in Bergen, Ruch writes: “I none of them middling, one-room affairs. Fantoft Stave was sick with fever… So we drove with the heat on maxi- Church in Bergen (torched in 1992) and Holmenkollen mum and Dead Can Dance on the stereo real loud. It was Chapel in Oslo (also torched in 1992) were spire-cross-and- quite atmospheric.” cornice-crowned behemoths situated on densely wooded outcroppings (and according to their torchers, on the bones of pre-Christian worship sites). In many ways, they were THE louder the better, it goes without saying. as suggestive of Black Metal aesthetics as they were of the But also the louder the more terrifying, and the further one Christian obeisance that Black Metalers had hoped to wipe transcends one’s self. You need only listen to Darkthrone’s from the earth by setting them alight. And watching these bulldozing Transylvanian Hunger, the mournful spikes and churches burn must have been in itself terrifying, as per declivities of Angmar’s Zuruck in die Unterwelt, the ethereal Burke’s definition, in a way that served to bring the arson- blitzkrieg of Wolves in the Throne Room’sCelestial Lineage, ists that much closer to what Emperor and Zyklon guitarist the decayed invocation of Carpathian Forest’s Shining Black Samoth calls humanity’s “cosmic dust” status in the “big pic- Leather, or the symphony of broadswords that is Emperor’s ture” of the universe. Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk to fully understand the aural In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the myopic antihero sublimity of Black Metal, wherein—or wherefrom, as the Victor describes a lightning storm he witnesses in the Alps genre would have it—you are driven to cower outside your- on his way to meet his monster as “so beautiful yet terrific,” self in the coldest and darkest dimension of sound. “a noble war in the sky” that lifted his spirits as “vivid flashes Or as the late Euronymous of Mayhem put it: “Fuck of lightning dazzled [his] eyes, illuminating the lake, making off! War and sodomy!” ADRIAN VAN YOUNG 25

What allows Black Metal to flirt with sublimity is also Nor is it accidental that Scandinavian Black Metalers what tethers it back to the earth. The Romantics incorporat- would come to “throw goats” (a euphemism for making ed nature and earthiness into their conception of the sub- the devil-horns gesture) in the face of organized religion lime—specifically, the degree to which nature reignedover in a way meant to elevate heathen beliefs. For example, humanity—and advocated, as does Black Metal, a return to the Swedish band Bathory, named for Elizabeth Bathory, vital primitivism, which in the late-18th and early-to-mid- the “Blood Countess” who had supposedly bathed in vir- 19th centuries meant a return to the Medieval period. gins’ blood to reverse the effects of unwelcome old age This sort of nostalgia helps explain the Romantic ob- and became for the Romantics a figure of interest. session with Gothic art and architecture (Cologne Cathe- The band thanked Wagner personally in the liner dral comes to mind), as well as the overall Gothic Revival notes to their 1990 album Hammerheart. Bathory was aesthetic—a melange of night and nature worship, super- one of the first “blackened” heavy metal bands to invoke naturalism, the touting of madness as a gateway into genius a return to Asatru, the worship of pre-Christian gods and, curiously, a return to clericalism. And this makes sense, such as Odin and Thor. Bathory’s first Asatru-worship- given that the “Romantic Revolution,” as Tim Blanning calls ping album, 1988’s Blood Fire Death, depicts in its cover it, served as a direct rebuff to the unlovely rationalism of the art the Oskorei or “Wild Hunt” of Scandinavian and Teu- Enlightenment. Many Romantics, in particular from Ger- tonic myth by way of Norwegian Romantic painter Peter many, would take their anti-Enlightenment stance to Black Nicolai Arbo. In the painting, a horde of spear-and-ham- Metal-like extremes (albeit Christian ones): Case in point, mer-wielding Valkyries and Vikings ride down out of the the “Nazarenes” of Vienna, a group of Romantic painters heavens on black horses dragging a nude woman, while that formed a “self-consciously backward-looking ‘Brother- carrion birds circle below. The picture is, to put it bluntly, hood of Saint Luke’ ” in 1809, then moved to a derelict mon- so fucking metal it’s not even funny. astery in Rome where they pursued communal living. The Black Metal movement is more than allu- Romantic composer Richard Wagner drew consider- sive to Romanticism’s pet obsessions. It is the unlikely able horn-and-helmet inspiration from so-called heathen fulfillment of Romantic ideals: absolute inwardness myths, as well—such as Germany’s Song of the Nibelungs, turned outward, for lack of somewhere else to go. Giv- and Iceland’s Edda and Volsunga Saga. In Wagner’s The Ring en the relentlessness of Black Metal music, the showy of the Nibelung, written between 1848 and 1874, Wagner did necro-Baroqueness of Black Metal fashion and the his Teuton damnedest to realize the ideals of his early 19th ­hyper-masculinity of Black Metal comportment, ab- century countryman Novalis, a poet who yearned for a time solute outwardness seems an apt characterization. The “when the world will be returned to a life free unto itself … Romantic sublime gives us the soul humbled in terror and man will recognize in myth and poem the true eternal before the greatness of nature or art; the Black Metal world history.” sublime shows us the terror inside us. That this notion of returning to some idealized state of It’s no wonder that Black Metalers have been slow to Nature by way of populist myth resounds with the Valkyrian embrace their inward-gazing ancestors. Black Metal is Ro- strains of proto-Fascism is no accident, especially given that manticism’s uncanny double: It’s the face in the mirror, Nationalism Socialism—another movement from which glimpsed dimly through corpse paint. The more that its Black Metal borrows aesthetic motifs—is Romantic Nation- followers try not to see it, the more resolutely it looks back alism undressed. askance. 26 EVERYBODY’S DOING IT Everybody’s Doing It

By MAXWELL NEELY-COHEN

Peer pressure has dissipated since its ’90s heyday, but the adolescent flat world is harder to navigate

THERE used to be order. Not being cool nihilistic or solipsistic or ironic tendencies intended— in a certain way meant rejection by the pack. The flock. she meant it literally. No one took a shot at the popular kids. When someone Peers are now just media filters, she said. Collectors. did try to mock teenage royalty, everyone else laughed Separated from their physical forms. Social pressure no at them. “Peer pressure no longer exists because peers longer comes from groups made up of singular individ- no longer exist” a 15-year-old girl told me recently. She uals confined to the unforgiving collective architecture wasn’t trying to make some pithy adolescent statement of a specific school. Instead, the adoption of aesthetics, about how there isn’t any “meaning” in “anything”—no identities, and behaviors are filtered through countless MAXWELL NEELY-COHEN 27 nodes on various networks, digital manifestations of hu- • That social station increased the likelihood of bel- mans and nonhumans alike. ligerence and harassment. Advertising executives are your older siblings. Ag- Faris put it to CNN like this: ing hipsters twice your age are your friends. The affec- Kids are caught up in patterns of cruelty and aggres- tations of generations past are yours. Your music can be sion that have to do with jockeying for status … It’s their music and their music can be your music. You have really not the kids that are psychologically troubled, who are on the margins or the fringes of the school’s access to any set of tastes or styles and the theoretical social life. It’s the kids right in the middle, at the heart ability to acquire and adopt them, to dress, listen, fuck, of things ... often, typically highly, well-liked popular kids who are engaging in these behaviors. When kids and/or ingest whatever you want. You no longer need a increase in their status, on average, they tend to have patient zero in your classroom. You don’t need the older a higher risk of victimization as well as a higher risk of becoming aggressive. kids to show you how to roll a joint. You can be the first and only to stop eating or the first to smoke up, or a few Now that social rejection is a defining characteris- years later the first to decide not to smoke up and write tic of teenage life, the threat just is not what it once was. black X’s on your hands and listen to hardcore. You can And it used to be everything. Before, high school popu- now discover straight edge on your browser and start a larity (or the lack of it) meant something more than rote Tumblr full of pictures of Ian Mackaye and bemoan how rank. It meant safety. The quest to be accepted, or even you didn’t grow up in the late ’80s. And you wouldn’t be better, “popular,” was rooted in normalized concepts of alone. And yes, your “peers” trolling the hallways and cell attractiveness, fashion, and sociocultural identity, creat- towers might make fun of you for this or that. But they’ll ing a class apart, so often described using the language of go after you either way. royalty. The privileged found themselves insulated from Now, unlike in the ’90s, being the dreamiest bas- mockery, bullying, virginity, gossip, hatred, and reproach ketball player or having the right halter top from the as they dominated the lower classes. It’s not that these mall pays no dividends; everyone is a target. Fair game monarchs weren’t resented or even hated, it’s that they for hatred in the schoolyard and ridicule on the wireless were safe. There was no way to get at them, the structure networks. No one is safe. The hierarchies still exist, and itself so powerful that fighting against it with any effec- status still exists, but it’s almost taken the life of a game. tiveness was solely the purview of teen films and novels. An ingrained biological response to the harsh conditions The heartwarming social breakdown ofThe Breakfast of scholastic pseudo-imprisonment. Club or the glorious revenge against the popular elite in In 2011, UC Davis sociologists Robert Faris and Heathers were fantasies, fictions, and dreams. Diane Femlee completed an authoritative study of the The greatest unfiltered high school documentary social network of a single North Carolina school. They of that era, 1986’s All American High, presents a stark- tracked the social status and interactions of every single ly different picture. The narrative of a Finnish exchange student over an entire semester, exhaustively cataloging student at Torrance High School portrays an absolutely every single instance of abuse and harassment. While the rigid structure of social status and popularity that would entire study is worth reading in its own right, its most challenge any Hollywood cliché, but without any narra- interesting conclusions were: tive of upheaval, no ugly-duckling loser magically becom- • Singular students were often both targets and per- ing prom queen. The outsiders are so marginalized and petrators, bully and victim. dispersed, they are barely depicted, mentioned in passing 28 EVERYBODY’S DOING IT

through hushed sidelong glances as the uncomplicated identifiable packs of the outliers. Tribes of punks and caste system is explored through parties and social events. druggies and sluts and fags and blacks and whites and The greatest benefit to being one ofthem , to fitting goths and disturbed kids that your mom is afraid might into their values (and not being one of the “punkers”), just shoot up the whole fucking place. was, in a sense, security. It was good to be king and it was The 1996 short documentary Dirty Girls, which good to be queen, and good to be just like the king and depicts a group of grungy pseudo-riot-grrrl 8th graders, queen. But it really wasn’t about them, and it wasn’t really shows how far the degeneration of the traditional social a monarchy, the starting quarterback homecoming king structure had come in a decade. The have-nots were not and the beautiful it-girl were not powerful, the system only multiplying, but they had formed their own inde- was, and any insurgent was helpless against it. pendent architectures of order, conformity, and aggres- But over the next 15 years that system crumbled. sion. And most strikingly of all, they were engaged in The unified mass-culture started to fray. There could be open combat and competition with the entire social sys- multiple hierarchies at the same time. Where previous- tem. In Dirty Girls, everyone in the school knows sisters ly there had been single othered individuals, there grew Amber and Harper, the leaders of the faction. They are MAXWELL NEELY-COHEN 29 not the faceless nameless roving “punkers” in All Ameri- moral panic dominated the psychic landscape that week. can High. They are royalty in their own right, and even if Peer pressure, even among adults, no longer works they are reviled by many, they revile back in turn. as well as it did. The urge to be part of the pack lurks As subcultures and possible group identities swelled alongside the yearning to be different. To be set apart. in membership and variety, peer pressure became the And in this, the children of America have become true go-to explanation for any parent concerned about the masters, iconoclastic heathens willing to claim anything emergence of youth subcultures. My kid is smoking pot or knock down any idol. because of those kids in his school. He’s having sex not One of the multiple narratives that make up the because he wants to, but because if he doesn’t his friends 2011 documentary Bully centers on Kelby, an open- will make fun of him for being a prude or gay and that’s ly lesbian 16-year-old growing up in Tuttle, Oklahoma. just the worst. She experiences a level of hate and ostracism so extreme, The circa-1998 peer pressure educational video not just from her peers but from the entire town, that that was repeatedly screened in my middle school was her (wonderful) parents at one point offer to move the saturated with regressive racial coding and cultural para- entire family to more friendly blue-state territory. But noia. The “drug” scenario consisted of a cluster of most- lost in the incredible hostility that comes with living in ly black boys pressuring a smaller bespectacled white one of the most bigoted and antagonistic spheres in red- freshman into “smoking dope” in a graffiti covered alley state America is the remarkable discovery that she is not while a hip-hop instrumental track that sounded like an alone. The film shows her with her cadre of friends, an as- elevator music ripoff of Public Enemy’s “Security of the sembly of LBGT kids and straight allies, existing togeth- First World” blared in the background. The “drunk driv- er in her high school despite the extraordinary pressure. ing” scenario featured a short-haired female guitar player Their open presence in this environment demonstrates and an effeminate male painter trying to goad a dimpled resilience in the face of not only the pressures of their blonde girl into “joyriding” with them. Most comical- peers, but of their mothers, fathers, community leaders, ly of all, the “academic cheating” scenario featured two and teachers. raven-haired seniors dressed in all black at computers Parents have mostly given up on peer pressure as wearing ­sunglasses—what the B-movie producers clearly a paradigm defining element of molding their teenag- intended to signify as hackers—imploring a poor nerd to ers in favor of freaking out about bullying/bystanding/ join them in stealing the answers for the test. The clique not-killing-yourself. Adults now do not believe in peer of self-assured girls haranguing their peer to start having pressure so much as media pressure (“Miley Cyrus made sex all had large books on politics or history in front of my daughter a pot-smoking slut” instead of “Peer pres- them. The gyno-, techno-, homo-, and xenophobia cul- sure made my daughter a pot-smoking slut”) or techno- minated in a scene on “gangs” and the pressure of “gang logical pressure (“My son doesn’t get any sleep because initiation” so openly racist it must be the reason the vid- he stays up all night texting his friends”), fully embrac- eo is unfindable on the Internet today. ing the awful politics of moral panics that dominated This propaganda campaign against peer pressure, generational relations for the entire second half of the which peaked sometime in those late ’90s, represented 20th century. Comic books, movies, malls, feminism, nothing more than a vain attempt to harness already-­ Doom, gay-straight alliances, Tibetan Freedom Concerts, existing nonconformity and direct it toward whichever Woodstock, Woodstock ’99, Grand Theft Auto, Net- 30 EVERYBODY’S DOING IT

flix, sex ­education, Joan Jett, Livejournal, Jack Kerouac, rary parentdom, the primary parental target of the peer Harry Potter, football, Facebook, Elvis, soccer, Nirvana, pressure propaganda campaign is drugs and alcohol. It Cypress Hill, grinding, Miley Cyrus, World of Warcraft, remains a tool to make your teen feel safe just saying no! computers, cellphones, smartphones, Jay-Z, soda, candy, like Nancy Reagan kindly told them to two decades be- sugary cereal, Minecraft, Ray Bradbury, Beyoncé, veg- fore they were even born. Leaving aside the absurd hy- etarianism, Marilyn Manson, Dance Dance Revolution, pocrisy of the modern American adult having any cred- the Beatles, 2Pac, skateboarding, and teaching evolution ibility when it comes to alcohol abuse, we have reached have all at one point or another supposedly so threatened the point where parents, teachers, and psychiatrists are the total destruction of American youth to the degree force-feeding their children prescription drugs at a rate that they warranted national media coverage. no “everybody’s doing it” culture could possibly match But what parents and educators so often labeled with weed, meth, and cocaine. Not to mention the be- as peer pressure was actually the disease-like spread of havioral message that is sent when according to Comfort- ideas. It’s a degree of symbolic freedom and movement ably Numb author Charles Barber somewhere more than that made adults uncomfortable. The truly horrible 200 million antidepressant prescriptions are distributed things that happen to teenage lives are more the result to adults every year. of socioeconomic reality (gang violence), the failure of The constant economic and political warfare of the the mental health state (drugs, alcohol, shooting up the so-called adult world is impossible to separate from teen- school), the horrific patriarchy of larger adult society age life, yielding a landscape of volatility no adolescent (rape), or the all-around idiotic idea of the “school” as we culture of social rejection could produce. Peer pressures construct it than they ever are the sole province of a teens pale in comparison to these forces from above, so it’s no en masse fearing social rejection. wonder teens cluster in their own defense. Over a gen- Serious explorations of peer pressure as a primary eration, being the outsider itself has been commodified. subject, whether works of fiction or social science, al- By the time Hot Topic started trading on the NASDAQ, most never involve high school. Christopher R. Brown- the image of the outcast that the teens of the 1980s and ing’s Ordinary Men, a history of Reserve Police Battalion 1990s worked so hard to create was formally rid of its pri- 101’s participation in the Holocaust, intimately explores mal appeal, and if there was any classical peer pressure the role peer pressure played in turning an assembly of left, it was pushing in and out in too many contradictory “middle-aged, mostly working class” men into genocidal directions to count. killers who massacred the entire populations of towns un- With a whole catalog of alt archetypes, it’s easier der the orders of certain quotas. They later shot captured than ever to be insufficient. The top-down pressure sys- Jews that could not fit on the train cars destined for the tem is gone, replaced by a turbulent field of peer friction death camps. The men’s superiors gave them the option in which every identity is always vulnerable. The 15-year- of not participating in such acts without shame or con- old girl who told me “peer pressure no longer exists” sequence, yet almost all of them did in a mind-boggling also made it very clear in no way did that result in the psychological confluence of obedience and groupthink. perfect adolescent paradigm defined by love and respect. Many claimed they simply did not want to see their peers “They’re all annoying,” she said. “I hate them for trying have to commit such acts alone. so hard to be part of the group. And I hate them for trying To the extent to which it still lingers in contempo- so hard to be different and special.” JW MCCORMACK 31 Consciously or Unconsciously

By JW MCCORMACK

Is the infamous white-supremacist novel The Turner Diaries a real threat, or just a shitty book for shitty people?

YOU have to be pretty good at what you do to neers a near casualty-free coup. The only victims are that get things exactly wrong. And you have to be better than family of pretenders representative of “all decadent democ- that to survive the censors. Case in point, a passage about racies,” in an outcome that will be seen as inevitable to the a hundred pages into Vladimir Nabokov’s dystopic fantasy reader nimble enough to ferret out “the real plot of the play.” Bend Sinister, wherein one Professor Hamm salvages Ham- “Whatever Shakespeare’s intentions were, there can be no let for the prevailing Orwellian Fascist jet-set. In Hamm’s doubt that the keynote, the impelling power of the action, paranoid exegesis of the play’s key scenes, the racially pure is the corruption of civil and military life in Denmark. . . Fortinbras, denuded of his valid claim to the throne, engi- Consciously or unconsciously, the author of Hamlet has 32 CONSCIOUSLY OR UNCONSCIOUSLY

created the tragedy of the masses and thus has founded the imagine the impossible, a corpus of right-wing loonies com- sovereignty of society over the individual.” posing poems parallel to the existing canon, succumbing With that neat phrase “consciously or unconscious- to the same torments and petty rivalries. Is it, as has been ly,” words are divorced from their author and neutralized of widely and perhaps naively suggested, that the liberal left is their intent. Even if you are an uncommonly talented writer, better situated to imagine alternatives to the extant order of a reader is within his rights to see the worst in you. Conscious- things? Or, in the case of realism, more willing to trace social ly, say the ghoulish Professor Hamms of the world, you write fallout back to its origins in the human heart (and not, say, to contribute to the consensual humanist model of reality. the government)? Is it that the conservative right so often Unconsciously you want to replace it with your own model. functions as custodian to a stiff or idealized version of truth that forbids the looseness that novelistic invention calls for? Or am I falling prey to another conflation of ‘consciously or unconsciously,’ where I instinctively equate the values of the author I admire with my own? (Nabokov’s reported anti-­ Céline heads Semitism is surely a point for the opposition here.) Come to that, if we read printed thoughts for the length of a novel, do up the pack, a we eventually mistake them for our own ideas? bona fide Nazi If this sounds like nonsense, good news: It is! There’s no shortage of unmistakably great novelists with unmistak- collaborationist ably rancid politics. Céline heads up the pack, a bona fide Nazi collaborationist beyond rehabilitation and bigot by any beyond definition. But we don’t read Céline for his political vision (unless you’re reading one of his untranslated anti-Jewish rehabilitation rants like Trifles for a Massacre, in which case, oh dear). We read him precisely because we recognize, seething beneath and bigot by any the surface of his universalized misanthropy—prior to its consequent transformation into actual racism—a bile we definition. can more or less call our own, and which seems unlikely to trigger spontaneous goose-stepping on the part of the read- er. Meanwhile, most contemporaryish writers spend a lot of Consciously you desire the highest and best. Unconsciously time making themselves approachable, not so much telling you ache to lick Big Brother’s plus-size jackboots. Or as Bart you what you ought to believe as filling in what you already Simpson’s nemesis Sideshow Bob has it, “Your guilty con- suspect, consciously or unconsciously. To empathize with science may force you to vote Democratic, but deep down me, you must already be me. For Proust—and many after inside you secretly long for a cold-hearted Republican to him—reading books is a way into the alien worlds known lower taxes, brutalize criminals and rule you like a king!” as other people. Doesn’t it figure that some of those worlds That the radical right rarely produces its own literature would turn out to be hostile? has not gone unnoticed. Part of the mean fun of Roberto Maybe the question to ask at this juncture is the one Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americas was being asked to ambiguously posed by J.M. Coetzee in Elizabeth Costello: JW MCCORMACK 33

Are there things that ought never be written about or read? el—that only tells the bad guys’ version. Following their mi- Is there such a thing as obscenity, a book whose only blurb litia’s commandeering of California, Turner and his cohorts should be “You will not learn from such an experience. It will achieve their goals in a grisly purge of non-whites, non-sub- not be good for you”? If you haven’t thought of Ayn Rand missive women, and “race traitors” that is positively giddy yet, by all means go on not thinking of her. Or, better, take in its evocation of lynchings, citywide riots organized along some comfort in the fact that the single textbook case of a racial lines, and nuclear war. (There is apparently no contin- conservative belles-lettres inspires nothing worse than ma- gency plan in the Nazi playbook for dealing with Red China terialism raised to the status of a minor world religion. Be- beyond nuking it from space.) cause there are far nastier things lurking in the American This, then, is the speculative fiction answer to Mein ‘consciously or unconsciously,’ and things are going to get Kampf and The Protocols of Zion. There is even some ques- rougher from here on out. tion as to whether it can be called a novel at all, if it isn’t more correct to view it as propaganda. Or more accurately, meta-propaganda, given that Turner views the leaflets his THE Turner Diaries is almost unanimously reviled cell is tasked with printing and distributing with surprising- as the seminal novel produced in the U.S. by the white su- ly realistic resignation: as feeble rejoinders to mass media, premacy movement. Published in 1978 by William Luther fringe to the norms of tolerance and equality that they rail Pierce, a lifelong Neo-Nazi descended from the Attorney against. Of course, the more lost the cause, the more no- General of the Confederacy, under the name Andrew ble the gesture in the eyes of its disciples, so we get several McDonald, The Turner Diaries didn’t quite make the ini- self-pitying tirades about Americans “marching in lockstep tial splash of its 1905 predecessor, Thomas Dixon Jr.’s The with the high priests of the TV religion,” the corruption of Clansman. That book more or less single-handedly revived innocent youth by hippie mentality, Hitler’s bad rap, and so the Ku Klux Klan following its immortalization in D.W. on. Meanwhile, the most effective propaganda doesn’t come Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (to which we owe the hoods from the Aryans’ side at all, but from the System’s attempts and burning crosses). But it became clear that Diaries had to appropriate public fear of the terrorist plots for their own found its audience by 1995, when it was discovered in the ends, as they “cynically” deploy it towards “certain programs possession of Timothy McVeigh. Pierce’s novel was repub- of their own.” It’s a fascinating moment of clarity brought to lished in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, and has you by paranoia so pervasive it can’t help but recognize its since been linked to numerous hate crimes. It is routinely own stratagems behind the scrim of homeland security. identified as “the Bible of the racist right.” In a sense, The Turner Diaries is a textbook case of the Beginning in the far-fetched future of 1991 and pur- Utopian novel, working out its present-day manias against porting to be the found diary of Earl Turner, a member of the future’s peerless green-screen. Like The Handmaid’s an Aryan network called “the Organization” that seeks the Tale or Fahrenheit 451, Pierce proceeds by extending pres- wholesale destruction of that undifferentiated hodgepodge ent circumstance into a worst-case scenario, the instruc- of the liberal media, police force, and Democratic govern- tive difference being thatnothing could be worse than the ment it calls “the System,” The Turner Diaries leaps from one Organization’s pogrom against “the Jewish-liberal-demo- vicious crackpot scenario to another in what is essentially a cratic-equalitarian plague.” The book perfectly fits the anx- world takeover procedural. It is as though the fever dreams ious criteria defined by Frederic Jameson in his brilliant of the extremist right have taken the form of a Bond nov- ­deconstruction of Utopian science-fiction, Archaeologies of 34 CONSCIOUSLY OR UNCONSCIOUSLY

the Future: a manifestation of “that fear of losing that famil- unpleasant set pieces that detail our diarist’s own awakening iar world in which all our vices and virtues are rooted…in into Caucasian pride, as he is inducted into a secret soci- exchange for a world in which all these things and experi- ety within the Organization (named, with the same dearth ences—positive as well as negative—will have been obliter- of imagination, the Order) and learns of the sacrifices that ated.” must be made if the populace is ever to be awakened from The motivating fear in this case is dismayingly predict- their somnolent liberal funk. able: the rising “cosmopolitanism,” a telltale code word for Hence we are treated to Turner’s disgust at being forced Civil Rights and pro-Israel foreign policy, and the seizing of all privately owned firearms by the System (“I’ll never forget that terrible day,” writes Turner in his first entry). The Organiza- tion strikes back with a concentrated effort to infiltrate human rights councils, purchase influential lawyers, and, through ter- rorist acts such as the decimation of FBI headquarters, pro- voke a media panic that forces the government to institute draconian measures of heightened security, including internal checkpoints and overzealous police presence in the country’s shaken capital cities, “thus alienating a portion of the popula- tion and generating sympathy for the terrorists.” If this sounds like a chilling, pre-9/11 vision of things that are, fear not: Pierce’s rendition of the breakdown of soci- ety connects the dots between every single radical right-wing fantasy in a manner so brazenly submental that it sounds to disguise himself as a Jewish print shop owner, and per- like parody. It could easily have been composed by one of sonal milestones like gunning down random mixed couples Bolaño’s Nazi scribblers on an unusually uninspired writing (“Six months ago I couldn’t imagine myself calmly butch- day. Of one formerly upscale Washington neighborhood, ering a teen-aged White girl, no matter what she had done. we’re told: “Most of the high-priced shops have given way But I have become much more realistic about life recently”). to ‘gay’ bars, massage parlors, porn stalls, liquor stores, and Throughout, the perverse rosiness of Turner’s vision of a ra- similar capitalist ventures… Ritual torture and ritual murder cially pure tomorrow beggars belief. Two scenes stand out: are rumored to take place, as well as ritual cannibalism, ritual a batshit encounter with a cadre of freckly 15-year-old girls sex orgies, and other non-Western practices.” Turner (whose merrily picking fruit on behalf of the camp-dwelling fami- own rituals include beginning his diary entries with a cheery lies left hungry by the collapse of regular food production, “Wow!” or “What a day!”) oscillates between two equally and an even more telling one, in which the Order convicts repulsive narrative modes. First, there are the exhausting a libertarian in their midst on charges of mutiny: “He was lists of atrocities carried out by his colleagues (as though the a conservative, not a revolutionary.” Worse, he is a reformer burning of synagogues and slaughter of leftist newspaper ed- with hope that mere tax reform and the restoration of free itors amounted to the hum-drummiest trivialities) as their enterprise will be enough to heal the ailing U.S. economy. terror campaign gradually balloons from scattered assassina- Not even John Galt deserves to inherit this brave new world. tion squads to a global conspiracy. Second are the uniformly The Turner Diaries is an obsessively paranoid and re- JW MCCORMACK 35 actionary piece of Hitler fan-fiction, unrelentingly violent, Yet the violence enacted in direct response to numb to irony or satire, and possessed of no literary merit. Pierce’s novel, some of it by a group of Mormon white Is it just a shitty book for shitty people, or does it pose a real nationalists actually calling themselves the Order, means threat? Among the pseudo-philosophical justifications of that I’m not merely given pause by the prospect I was the Organization’s evil schemes appears the following: once so glib about—far-right literature as corrective to the unchallenging contemporary armchair progressivism The fact is that the ordinary people are not really much less that gave us the Park Slope novel—I’m inclined to run to culpable than the not-so-ordinary people, than the pillars of the System. . . . I cannot think of any segment of White the other side for cover. society, from the Maryland red-necks and their families whose radioactive bodies we bulldozed into a huge pit a few days ago to the university professors we strung up in Los Angeles last July, which can truly claim that it did not Luther Pierce died of can- deserve what happened to it. WILLIAM cer in 2002. A one-man cottage industry of race hatred, he It is the banality of pronouncements like the above that was responsible for novels, records, and even comic books render The Turner Diaries a disposable artifact of isolation- on the general theme of white supremacy and government ist megalomania, instead of anything resembling a practical overthrow. Most of these, including an additional “Andrew blueprint for budding race warriors—because the attentive McDonald” novel titled Hunter, appeared under the aegis of reader will note that Turner has just excluded everyone from the National Alliance, a splinter group of the National Youth his club. Moreover, he has condemned them to death. Borg- Alliance that in 1968 campaigned unsuccessfully on behalf es’s “Sect of the Phoenix” imagines an invisible brotherhood of segregationist Alabama governor and frequent Presiden- to which all people secretly belong. Pierce’s annihilating ne- tial candidate George Wallace. But Pierce had been linked on-white Utopia only has room for Pierce. It is not just other to reactionary groups as early as 1962, when he joined the races or religions that are tainted, it is all other people. John Birch Society while working as a physics professor at Pierce weeds out the enemies he perceives clustered Oregon State University. While Black Power was picking about every rung of civilized society in a series of ‘notes to up steam, Pierce was editing the ideological journal of the the reader’ from our future white overlords that get steadily American Nazi Party. But it wasn’t until he organized the creepier, defining, among other things, soon-to-be-archa- Alliance in 1972 that his literary activities began in earnest. ic concepts like ‘Women’s lib’ (“a form of mass psychosis Equal parts publishing firm and quasi-revolutionary van- which broke out during the last three decades of the Old Era. guard, the N.A. specialized in Holocaust denial literature, Women affected by it denied their femininity and insisted agitated against American aid to Israel during the Yom Kip- that they were “people,” not “women”). Even Turner even- pur War, and, in the 90s, expanded into comic books like tually goes out a martyr, strapped to a warhead aimed at the the nuttySaga of White Will, about one high school racist’s Pentagon, leaving William Pierce (or, rather, pseudonymous journey to manhood. (An ad in the back reads “Hey, kids! “Andrew McDonald”) to proclaim his victory over the plan- Want to find out about the organization White Will plans et he has reduced—as reported in a hasty three-page post- to join when he’s 18? Write today.”) In the 80s Pierce even script set 106 years in the future—to all-but-uninhabitable founded a zany Pantheist religion called the Cosmotheist rubble. Any novelty represented by the existence of such an Community Church, and married a suspicious succession earnestly hateful “adventure novel,” as Pierce referred to it, of Hungarian women. quickly vanishes amid the wacko wish-gratification. The second Andrew McDonald novel, Hunter (1989), 36 CONSCIOUSLY OR UNCONSCIOUSLY

is about a B-4 Phantom II pilot who assassinates mixed-race gration hate group in 1995. Several Neo-Confederate “heri- couples. Its hero is tacitly based on supremacist serial killer tage”-focused works followed suit, like the treacly Old South Joseph Paul Franklin, best known as the gunman who para- fable The Last Confederate Flag by Lloyd Lenard, and Ellen lyzed Larry Flynt from the waist down. But it was The Turn- Williams’s Bedford, a World Vision (on the subject of integrat- er Diaries that sustained the N.A.’s fortunes, going strong at ed public schools). In John Ross’s Unintended Consequences, the time of Pierce’s death, thanks in large part to the public- a brutal Fourth-Amendment revenge fantasy that follows ity that resulted from the Oklahoma City bombings and a thematically from The Turner Diaries, a freedom fighter takes canny 1996 sale of the book’s rights to Lyle Stuart, one of up arms against an overreaching government infected with the great sleazeballs of publishing, whose other properties the scourge liberalism. The Diaries’ science-fiction elements, included The Anarchist Cookbook, Naked Came the Stranger, meanwhile, were picked up by James McManus—not the and L. Ron Hubbard: Messiah or Madman? poker writer of the same name—in his futuristic eugenics novel Dark Millennium, which follows one of the last surviv- ing racists as he becomes President of Earth for life. Another Racist-in-the-Year-3000-type novel is Ward Kendall’s recent The ordinary Hold Back This Day, where the last pure white man on earth defies the all-powerful ‘Chrislamhindbuddhism’ religion to reader is not going form an all-white colony on Mars. Finally, Pat Shannan’s One In a Million features one man’s crusade to reinstate gold and to be consciously silver as the only legal tender; reportedly, Shannan hoped to secure a movie deal by sending a copy of the book to Mel persuaded into Gibson’s dad. Are there things that ought never be written about or hate crime read? Elizabeth Costello asks this question—and answers in the affirmative—in a lecture about a novel about a Nazi by a rushed, hangman. Coetzee, by critical consensus, probably intends monotonous for her argument to be flawed; but leveled against Pierce, his heirs, and their responsive audience of thugs and domestic piece of hack terrorists, it is apt. Here is a book that should never have been written, that I wish I could erase, along with the mentality science-fiction. that made it possible. Does that mean that others should be kept from reading it? Ideally, yes. Susan Sontag warned against the fetishization of Nazi art, whose nervy outsider As detailed by the Southern Poverty Law Center in status inevitably make it ripe for apologism and flirtations their quarterly Intelligence Report, a minor avalanche of far- on the part of contemporary critics. The Turner Diaries is no right and explicitly racist fiction followed theDiaries ’ return flirtation, but a slavery liplock. to bookstores. An English translation of an early 70s French The ordinary reader is not going to be consciously per- novel called The Camp of the Saints, written to protest the suaded into hate crime by a rushed, monotonous piece of tide of Algerian immigration, was reissued by an anti-immi- hack science-fiction—but propaganda does not only work JW MCCORMACK 37 consciously, as Pierce was well aware. “If the protagonist alone accounts for the lack of otherwise plentiful hate- learns something or comes to believe in something,” he speech and persecution in fiction—because they are, wrote, “the reader tends to do the same thing, he changes too. put succinctly, an embarrassment to their cause. They So what you have is a powerful teaching tool.” Not especially consciously expose an impotent stupidity, devoid of in- complex reasoning, but not unlike the usual critical wisdom. dependent reasoning, that derives its aura of fear from It’s something you might hear in a writing workshop. And, to remaining secretive, unconscious, a trope rather than a follow this argument to its conclusion, isn’t Pierce only do- reality. The figure of the modern Nazi occupies a place ing consciously, and poorly, what other writers have tucked of ephemeral omnipresence in popular culture. See, for more fiendishly and artfully beneath the surface? Xenopho- example, how a gang of featurelessly evil white suprem- bic hatred was the impetus for the work of H.P. Lovecraft, acists were spooned into the last half-season of Breaking whose stories of New England society’s infection by the Bad as last-minute antagonists, because who do we hate alien other have been increasingly embraced as kitsch. His even more than cops or meth dealers? The human rights catch-all term for the subhuman denizens of the Lower East activist Stetson Kennedy discredited the Ku Klux Klan at Side, “Italo-Semitico-Mongoloid,” is as undiscerning in its their height in the 1940s by simply ensuring that their be- despicableness as Pierce’s “Jewish-liberal-democratic-equal- liefs and practices became common knowledge. The fact itarian plague.” that Stetson may occasionally have falsified aspects of his We’re equally keen to overlook, if not covertly enjoy, reports only enhances the value of a genocidal white na- the militantly Fascist posturing of Yukio Mishima—who has tionalist like Pierce foolish enough to speak for himself. surely eclipsed Hermann Hesse as the angry young man’s au- A representative literature, it turns out, is the worst thing thor of choice—if only because it is appealingly juxtaposed that could happen to the movement. with his distinct homoeroticism. And what about writers Ultimately, the far right can’t survive close reading. who narratively inhabit racist brainwaves, such as William Once we’ve seen the ideology so exposed, toothless and T. Vollmann in “White Knights” or Padgett Powell’s “Typi- disfigured, tongue gnashing at modernity like a demon in cal,” both stories dedicated to lending authentic voice to un- a Bosch painting, it becomes clear how little it has to offer. repentant superpatriots? Is ventriloquizing prejudices you It can only interrupt and imitate poorly, never contribute. don’t outwardly espouse only the difference between con- When we have them in their own words these would-be sciously and unconsciously? provocateurs lose their claim on our unconscious. I began I could go on, asking fatuous questions and inten- by wondering at the relative absence of radical right-wing lit- tionally misunderstanding fiction’s nominalism, steriliz- erature—but it’s too bad for the right that there’s any at all. ing my library against the germs of the National Front or The goal of these books is to reinforce the idea that whole the Aryan brotherhood. Perhaps the above handwring- races and beliefs are less than human. This is anathema to the ing will suffice for a demonstration of how far-right lit- nature of novels, which is always to humanize. For obvious erature can do us harm: by causing us to read narrowly reasons, the result does not work in the Nazis’ favor. In fact, and misread widely. And misreading, as Nabokov’s Pro- coming away from Pierce and his brood of regressive Uto- fessor Hamm illustrated, is what propagandists depend pians, one has a much more realistic picture of what kind of upon. Misreading is the specialty of authoritarian causes; people write them. They are humanized too; but that’s only it constitutes the bulk of their output. Original panegy- a good thing if you are not a sorry excuse for a human being rics like The Turner Diaries are rarer—and perhaps this in the first place. 38 KILL THE PHILOSOPHER IN YOUR HEAD REVIEW Kill the Philosopher in Your Head BY ANNE BOYER

Althusserianism has always been a Marxism for those who prefer their class struggle as philosophy

Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses; Verso, 2014; 288 pages

LOUIS Althusser was upset about the cop on repression alone. Its real engine was “beautiful lies.” in your head. Or rather, he was upset that the students You would be better off to imagine, in place of the cop in on the streets in Paris ’68 told you there was one there to your head, yourself in your head. What the you in your head kill, so much so that he wanted their slogan “Kill the Cop looks like is someone propelled by society’s beautiful lies. in Your Head” damned to what he called “the Museum of Do you recognize yourself as yourself? Say hi. You are an the History of Masterpieces of Theoretical and Political Er- “interpellated subject of ideology.” ror.” These “anarchists,” he wrote, missed the point: It was And what, to Althusser, was ideology? It was, accord- not cops, prisons, armies, courts, and other forms of state ing to On the Reproduction of Capitalism, newly published by repression that sustained capitalism. To imagine them as Verso, “beautiful lies,” a pure dream fabricated by nothing, a the enemy in your head was a mistake, for according to Al- condition with no history, an always-ever, an imaginary rep- thusser, “everyone knows, after all,” that in your head, “one resentation of imaginary relations to real conditions, that can only have ideas.” what you always believe you are outside of but always in, a A philosopher might be lousy at fighting a cop on the bricolage of the day’s residue, the “pale, empty inverted reflec- streets, but no worries—the cop only appears to be what tion of real history,” where we “live and move and have all our is standing in the way of revolution. It is the you inside you being,” ideas made material, the opposite of science, “not the who are the enemy, trained since birth to be so. What the gendarme,” and also what all reality lies outside of—“emp- anarchists of ’68 should do, Althusser wrote, was give up ty, nugatory imaginary, patched together, arbitrarily, eyes their prejudice against the “authority of knowledge” and closed.” Ideology was not, Althusser insisted, composed of read Plato. They would then see that society couldn’t run “ideas,” though sometimes he slipped and said it was. If you ANNE BOYER 39 are ­confused by this list of descriptors, you might want to Geraldine Finn, in her 1981 polemic Why Althusser blame the interpellated subject of ideology in your head. Killed His Wife, wrote that the murder of Hélène could not And what, to his critics, was Althusser’s definition of be separated from his philosophy: “The truth is that the ideology? Wrong, mostly. Each newly available work of Al- Althusser who killed his wife is Althusser, the revolution- thusser is a new whetstone on which a generation of critics ary … His philosophical and intellectual practice cannot can sharpen its knives. With so many vivid works on the be separated from his personal and emotional practice: wrongness of Althusser his most remarkable legacy might they are rooted in the same soil and have the same material, be the way he collected the most distinguished haters and social, historical and ideological conditions of possibility their works of most memorably lucid hate. Even Althusser, and detemininancy.” Finn found the problem to be the rela- in The Future Lasts Forever—the memoir he wrote to ex- tionship between “science” and patriarchy. That is, to Finn, plain how he came to strangle to death his wife, Hélène, in “philosophers and political scientists have always killed 1980—went on at length about Althusser’s hatred of Al- their wives, either literally or figuratively, by reproducing thusser. He killed his wife, he said, because “I wanted at all the violent patriarchal social relation.” costs to destroy myself.” Thus it remains useful to draw a line from the problem Philosophy is harmless, except when it harms. It is no with Althusser (his thinking) to the problem with Althusser accident that philosophy and wife-killing are both conser- (strangling his wife). Althusser’s great fear, as he describes vative institutions with long cultural histories. In Althuss- in his memoir, was that he would be exposed as “a trickster er’s description of Hélène’s murder, it is as if he is describ- and deceiver and nothing more, a philosopher who knew ing not a person, but a pliant material: almost nothing about the history of philosophy or about Marx.” His fear was not without basis. His former student I was massaging the front of her neck. I pressed my thumbs into the hollow at the top of her breastbone and Jacques Rancière said it. British Historian E.P. Thompson then, still pressing, slowly moved them both, one to the said it over and over in his colorful anti-Althussarian screed left, the other to the right, up towards her ears where the flesh was hard. I continued massaging her in a V-shape. The Poverty of Theory. Althusser himself said as much, ad- The muscles in my forearms began to feel very tired; I was mitting that the claim he wrote “imaginary Marxism” was aware that they always did when I was massaging. not far from the truth. And yet it must be repeated: The Hélène’s face was calm and motionless; her eyes were problem with Althusser, apart from being a wife-murderer, open and staring at the ceiling. Suddenly, I was ter- ror-struck. Her eyes stared interminably, and I noticed the was that he was bad at Marx. tip of her tongue was showing between her teeth and lips, Althusser’s reputational fortune rises and falls often strange and still. I had seen dead bodies before, of course, but never in my life looked into the face of someone who in tandem with the rise and fall of action on the streets. had been strangled. Yet I knew she had been strangled. But His work is reading for the downtime that stays down. The how? I stood up and screamed: ‘I’ve strangled Hélène!’ thing about ideas is that one’s hands never have to get dirty In being unaware even if the person whose neck he is by touching them, or as the student placards chided in ’68: “massaging” from the front is alive or dead, Althusser in- “Structures don’t take to the streets.” Verso’s release, then, advertently describes philosophy’s fatal level of abstraction. of this first English translation of the aborted manuscript As the wife-killer treats human as object, a passive material of 1968 arrives in time to harvest the now overripe disillu- to be formed or unformed by more powerful hands, so too, sionment sown by Occupy. While the promotional mate- the kind of philosophy Althusser describes makes objects rials for the book promise “a key theoretical text for activ- of the masses, much to their own risk. ists,” what On The Reproduction of Capitalism provides is no 40 KILL THE PHILOSOPHER IN YOUR HEAD Hélène Rytmann, Althusser’s wife, 1957 (Agence Vu); Louis ALthusser (Sygma) ALthusser Louis Vu); (Agence 1957 wife, Hélène Rytmann, Althusser’s

instruction for revolution, but a messy, contradictory first Marx, improving him and restoring to his work the clarity draft full of unkept promises, maddening inconsistencies, and coherency Althusser believed it lacked—thus “master- boldly unsupported claims, a priori argument, amusing ti- ing his own thought better than he had done.” Althusser also rades, some Marxishly mystified Platonism, a sprinkling of admitted to have not read too much Marx when he first be- praise for Stalin, and what is generally considered to be Al- gan to write Marxist theory, explaining that his philosoph- thusser’s most useful and provocative work—what Thomp- ical method was not to read philosophical texts closely or son called “the ugliest thing he ever did”—the initial draft entirely but to “bore” into them and draw a “philosophical of what was to become the widely circulated and highly in- core sample” from which he would intuit the content of fluential “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” the whole. He was a philosopher who believed he needed The generous interpretation of Althusser is that he “no recourse to libraries,” and when it comes to his self-de- wasn’t bad at Marx; he was just iconoclastic: that, to borrow scribed liberation of Marx (who he considered “a prisoner from Marianne Moore, his was imaginary Marxism but with of the theoretical constraints of his day”), it shows. real toads in it. Althusser claimed that he was “correcting” The generous interpretation of Althusser’s other ANNE BOYER 41 problem—that it was Althusser himself who was the vic- Lenin (obviously). If, Althusser insists, the people some- tim of the murder he committed—is a more telling mea- times appear to be Philosophical in the active sense, this sure of the delirium of Althusserianism. Just as Althusser Philosophy does not originate among them as spontaneous frequently described the murder of Hélène as anything but mass consciousness but has been “disseminated” among the murder of Hélène—it was, variously, the destruction them by the specialists of rational thought. This is because, of himself, the destruction of evidence that he had lived, for Althusser, “the philosopher knows and says certain the eradication of his own disease, the confirmation of his things ordinary people do not know.” desire to never exist, the murder of his “castrating” mother, How the Philosophers disseminate their revolution- the murder of all women, and/or not a murder at all but an ary truths into the masses from the bottom of a well is an accident or an act of mercy, and also, what Helene really issue Althusser does not address from the bottom of his. wanted—Althusser’s appeal is often to those who would This is the book’s tell. Or, as Rancière put it, “cut off from like to think the world is what it is not. These are the Marx- revolutionary practice, there is no revolutionary theory ists of the type who differ from Marx in an important re- that is not transformed into its opposite.” One can almost gard. Althusserianism has been a Marxism for those who get the feeling—though he scratches around this like a cat prefer their class struggle as Philosophy. that has just used the litter box—that Althusser is about to Unlike Marx, Althusser believed in Philosophy. His explain to us that capitalism is happening because we need self-described métier was “to intervene in politics as a phi- a philosopher to come along and tell us we are all in a cave losopher and in philosophy as a politician.” What Althuss- watching a puppet show. er did was continuously write his own job description. The philosopher is, for Althusser, the one who has The philosophy that Althusser advocated was not the kind the chance to vanquish you to save you. The philosopher that anyone could do. To define this philosophy, Althusser is uniquely capable of a revolutionary killing of the you in turned to Plato’s presentation of “the stock figure of a phi- your head. But with Althusser, of course, killing can never losopher who goes around with his head in the clouds or just be a metaphor. in abstraction and ‘falls down wells’… because he keeps his As Althusser could not comprehend how strangling eyes trained on the heaven of ideas instead of the ground.” a person resulted in her death, or even that her death was What does a philosopher need to be a philosopher? Obvi- actually her death, and not his, so also he could not see that ously a well to fall into, and by inference, the dowsers, well the little-p “philosophy” which occurs among the people is diggers, water drawers, and others who in their difference neither as wholly received nor as wholly placatory as he be- from the philosopher will define him. lieved, nor is the Philosophy of the elite who fall into wells When these less cloud-oriented people do philoso- the people dug for them as revolutionary as he suspected. phy, according to Althusser, theirs is a small-p philosophy, Indeed, the well-digger, unlike the philosopher, is the one merely “to take things philosophically”—that is, to resign who with a shovel moves the earth; it is the philosopher to the world as it is. The capital-P Philosophers do “active” who is always waiting for ideas to fall from heaven. Al- and “strong” Philosophy. These include, for Althusser, the though Althusser very much disagreed with this statement, stoics (about whom he later admitted sketchy familiarity), we can return to the “unimproved” Marx for a reminder: communist militant philosophers (presumably including “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in var- himself), Plato (whose work he read a great deal), Marx ious ways; the point is to change it.” Philosophy can land (about whom he claimed an inconsistent knowledge), and you in a hole, but only action will get you out of it.

AUTHOR NAME 43 44 UNSOLICITED ADVICE FOR LIVING IN THE END TIMES

THE Internet had been draining me, and all can departed was now deemed to be either sick or selfish. No one say is thank you, Super Bowl. Full disclosure: I have no in- suggests that maybe he just loved getting high and—as drugs terest in football, and I detest the Super Bowl for reasons are illicit, illegal, and unregulated—­accidents happen. that don’t concern us here. But it was there for me when But now comes the relief, a judgment-free oasis. No I needed it: This overblown yearly celebration of violence more haranguing for a hanging, no more spouted-out and commercialism distracted the internet, rerouting it opinions about how a person with so much talent and a from the dark path it was dragging me down. family could die from drugs. With the Super Bowl, the The mostly left-wing people that I am associated with etch-a-sketch was flipped, and it was all cleared from the in my social-networking orbit were rivalling their right- Internet in a moment, like magic. JPEGs of chicken wings wing predecessors in the world of Hollywood instant jus- dressed as their favorite ’90s alt-rock grrls filled my news- tice. They condemned a man who had been found innocent feed. Recipes for tofu chicken wings from vegan football of a crime, a crime so abhorrent they would like to see him fans appeared, and as disgusting as they sound, they re- tried again and again for it. But one cannot merge from the placed the bad taste of the even more unpalatable subjects verge where self-appointed judges and juries have planted from earlier in the day. their flag. The online judges trended away from pedophilia and So again, thank you, Super Bowl. I thought I would suicidal selfishness toward garden-variety Bob Dylan hate, have to ban myself from the Internet and the crowdsourced and wonder at how this man who they revere so much (ex- rush to judgment overwhelming me. The constant passing of cept when they don’t) could sell out and choose to adver- judgment was such that the passing of a great actor, one who tise Greek yogurt and American cars. had died younger than expected from a drug overdose, could I love Twinkies, but my fear of partially hydrogenated not interrupt it. The group grieving soon turned from sadness oils keep me from chasing that dragon. Still, it’s my choice, to even more judgement: At first the drugs were to blame, and if one day I decide to give into that sweet swirl of sugar and the user was excused. Then the demons were brought and cream, please don’t judge me. Be sad for my clogged in, and even his talent was suspect as a cause of death. The arteries but happy for my joy. AUTHOR NAME 45